No Sheep

Moving Web Directories Cleanly

// February 13th, 2006 // Technology Bits

When working with large sites with a lot of content editors and changing departments, it is sometimes necessary to move around large sections of your sites structure. The major downfall to moving files is that when a search engine bot or user who bookmarked a sub page comes along and reuses their outdated link, they don’t find what they’re looking for.

A few potential solutions for this:

Leave the old content around for awhile.
– This leads to outdated content that is forgotten. Users get misinformation, and can’t enjoy your redesign.

Create a file in the old directory that does a JavaScript, META, or header redirect..
– This doesn’t scale well if there were many files or subdirectories.

Create a symbolic link (symlink) of the old directory to the new one.
– This can get out of hand making the filesystem difficult to manage. Additionally, it is easy to accidentally create circular links that can causes scripts to go into dangerous recursive loops down the directory structure.

Here’s a better solution.

If you are using Apache with mod_alias, simply add a RedirectMatch line like the following to your .htaccess file:
RedirectMatch permanent ^/old_url/(.*) /new_url/$1

Managing these RedirectMatch lines in your .htaccess is simple. In some cases with the power of regular expressions you can even simplify a ton of symlinks or redirects into just one RedirectMatch line. An additional benefit is the ability to specify the type of redirect. By saying permanent, you send the browser a 301 redirect meaning it should update its references. This is great for intelligent bots like the google bot.

Actually this merely scratches the surface of what you can do with RedirectMatch and other mod_alias directives.

apache, http, mod_alias, web, web server, directive, redirectstatus, htaccess, redirect, web programming, web development, symlink

People who looked at this item also looked at…

• Wii Launch
• World’s Ugliest Dog
• Spider-Woman Motion Comic Trailer
• WishList
• Search

Related items

• Augmented Reality Games
• SunGardHE Case Study: Luminis Portal for Alumni at Plymouth State
• 10 Good PHP Principles from Nettuts
• Silverback – Usability Testing
• Teleport For Mac